Wow! Lot’s of excitement. Thanks for all of the feedback. We just want to address a few of the topics that came up.

What is the beta? As WebGuerilla has pointed out the beta is an evolution of our Technology Preview. As you can tell we made major enhancements to the user interface and added a bunch of new features. We still have work to do, however, to get [search.msn.com...] to be able to use our new algorithmic search results that are available at [beta.search.msn.com...] .

How does one get into the results? All of our web results are generated algorithmically so you cannot buy your way into the index. We will not try and teach site optimization to you guys – assume you have that covered :) If you want to submit your URL to us you can do that at [beta.search.msn.com...] .

Also regarding relevance, there has been some speculation on some online forums about MSNBot using Google search result pages to build our index. Let us set the record straight – that is simply not true. We respect robots.txt and as a result we will not crawl Google’s search result pages.

With regards to site availability that is something we are continuously working on. Oshoma Momoh, a General Manager in the MSN Search team, posted a blurb about this on the MSN Search blog -- [blogs.msdn.com...] .

Finally some folks have asked why we don’t just turn this on for all users right now? We love the words of encouragement, however, we have a number of bugs that we need to fix and we need to make sure that we can run the service with great performance and deliver high quality results. We will get there.

Please keep the feedback and constructive criticism coming – we appreciate all of it.

Thanks again for the words of encouragement. As you would expect we are not ready to make any commitments to specific timelines. There are a number of things that we need to improve and get right before we can move to our own algorithmic results.

Webhound and others – kind of curious what you mean by MSN Beta being better than our current live in spammy categories – are we showing more spam than on the beta or less? :)

MSNdude said>>>>>>>>> Thanks again for the words of encouragement. As you would expect we are not ready to make any commitments to specific timelines. There are a number of things that we need to improve and get right before we can move to our own algorithmic results. Webhound and others – kind of curious what you mean by MSN Beta being better than our current live in spammy categories – are we showing more spam than on the beta or less? :)

-msndude (msd) <<<<<<<<<<<

Oh yes there are a lot more spam in the beta, if you want me to sticky my keywords I do so.............15 of 25 results are from the same company, with diferents domains.......it´s horrible

Interesting change. Some godawful trivial spam added, some seems to have left.

MSNdue, still ZERO sense of authority in these serps. That challenge really and truly needs to be addressed.

Massive volumes of unrelated links, plus domain keyword, and pages/sites outrank the obvious industry authorities. My main competitors, in terms of quality but not seo, are just nowhere. They each alone have more content on the topic than 95 of the top 100 put together.

== edited... I take back that "Zero" comment. Some multiword queries do exhibit a significant bit of authority valuation (not enough but some). Queries that target common file names though (like site.com/widgets/) tend to have far less authoritativeness.

That was the case but is much better now in Australia at least. Keyword hyphonated domains of minor sites are still higher than they should be - authority sites are now doing better than they were. If the authority sites aren't on top it makes the whole result look bad. [added] country specific domains should have precedence over top level domains in countries outside the US too.